by Jay Lake
That made me laugh. “The Prince of the City? He is a fop with less power than a decently successful chandler. He sits on a throne of lapis and silver to impress foreigners, and spends his time seducing their wives.”
“This is not so clear from Copper Downs,” she said with asperity.
“No. Petraeans see a title and think it makes the man.”
She returned my laugh. “You have become one of your country.”
“No more than you are.”
“No, I suppose not.” With a gathering of breath, the Dancing Mistress resumed her tale. “A claim has been made upon the Ducal throne. A threat, really. A bandit chieftain in the Blue Mountains campaigns ever closer to the city. His name is Choybalsan. He has taken up some of this old magic of my people, and wiped out half a dozen prides of us when we tried to fight him.”
“Oh…” I stepped around the fire and reached for her hand. “I am very sorry. So many soulpaths clipped to nothing.”
“To be sure.” She pulled away from me to stir the pot awhile. Then: “We are not numerous now. We never were, in truth. It would not take much more to drive my people from the world as anything but a memory.”
I sat with her in silence, until the Dancing Mistress was ready to resume the tale. Finally, she was. “Choybalsan is as deadly to my race as a fire to a forest. He has upset the gods as well. He seems likely to rise on the back of this freed magic to oppose them.”
“Did he kill the god who was slain?”
“Goddess. Marya, who watched over women’s desires. No, not him. We are not sure who did the deed-agents of the Saffron Tower acting in secret, or some darker force. That is what most disturbs the priests of Copper Downs.”
I could imagine.
“So,” she went on, “we come to you. The only person alive besides Choybalsan who has controlled that magic he now rides.”
Recoiling with horror, I nearly shouted, “I did not control it!” The tillerman Chowdry looked up to see what we were about with our arguing.
The Dancing Mistress shook her head. “Oh, surely you did, when you unbound the spells from the Duke.”
This so distressed me that I went and exercised myself with a boat hook for a very long time, until the captain came to beg me to stop destroying the rail.
We avoided each other most of that day, but the sense of the Dancing Mistress’ story was clear enough. I had touched it last before this Choybalsan. If anyone could turn him, it might be me.
Such reasoning smacked of idiotic desperation. The Duke had spent four centuries suppressing all other powers in his demesne. He’d even cowed the gods to silence. Who else could rise up now to defend Copper Downs?
Not me. Toppling one magic-ridden despot was more than enough to last me this lifetime and my next several turns on the Wheel besides.
In time we reached the shipping lanes. I’d grown accustomed to Utavi and his sailors-the nervously smiling Chowdry, Utavi’s giant catamite Tullah, the rest of the sullen crew, but I was eager to be on to the Stone Coast. Loitering in the shallows along Bhopura gained us nothing. Along the way, our hosts had argued several times late into the night, making me nervous, but always they hid their words from us.
The captain did not hide so much. He grumbled time and again. I think Utavi would have sold us out even then if he could have found a buyer, though our swaggering ways and his fear of Mother Vajpai should have discouraged him from that plan.
In any case, he took us out into the deeper water, away from Chittachai ’s natural habitat, where we could find the big oceangoing traffic. The men grew nervous in the open sea, but money was money, and they were making well more than a year’s wages with the work of little more than a week. We hailed two ships before we found a third who would both answer and admit to being bound for the Stone Coast. Lucidinous was a high-sided iron-hulled vessel flying a flag from Dun Cranmoor.
When we’d finally talked ourselves aboard, Chowdry scrambled after me up the ladder.
“Where are you going?” I asked him roughly in Seliu.
“Utavi has threatened my life,” he replied with a quaver in his voice. “I would not agree to bind you over for sale back in Kalimpura.”
Bastards, I thought. It had been Chowdry who seemed at the disdvantage in their whispered disputes.
“You have no place where I am going,” I hissed, but already Utavi was cursing loudly from below, and pale-skinned sailors were tugging me over the rail. They glared down at Chowdry, then heaved him aboard as well when Utavi showed them a long curved blade.
The decision was out of our hands.
Chowdry stood at the rail and cursed in some dialect of Seliu that I could barely follow, until a pair of bulky men took us all to see a ship’s mate.
He was as pale as the rest of them, which was to say in these latitudes red as an apple above his sweat-stained whites. “You ain’t armed, I trust.”
I was mortified at how pleasing I found a Petraean voice. “Only a work knife, sir,” I said.
The Dancing Mistress bowed and flexed her claws.
“You don’t worry me, ma’am,” he told her with a tight smile. “Come on, then.” The mate waved us out.
We followed, Chowdry reluctant in the face of new authority. We were swiftly brought to a small mess. Looking at the four men waiting behind the table, I realized this was a hearing.
Then I saw that one of them was Srini, the purser from Southern Escape.
His astonishment was even greater than my own. “Green,” he said in Seliu, half-rising from his seat. He took it again in some embarrassment as the fat man at the end of the table glared him down.
“Srini,” I said in Petraean. “It is good to see you again.”
“These people are known to you?” the captain asked Srini.
“Only the gi-” He took in my cropped hair and sailor’s clothes, then corrected himself. “Only Green.”
The purser’s slip might as well have been a thunderclap, but no one else seemed to notice.
“Not many of you southern lads speak so well,” the captain said. “What are you doing with this pardine?” He turned to the Dancing Mistress. “Begging your pardon, my lady.”
“No pardon required,” she said graciously. “Green was my very apt pupil in Copper Downs.”
The look in his eyes told me I’d just risen considerably in status. “We’re well under way, even with stopping to take you on. So you’ll all be coming north. We call at Lost Port, then Copper Downs, then home to Dun Cranmoor.”
“I can guarantee you triple fare when we land at Copper Downs,” the Dancing Mistress told him.
“Or we’ll work for it now,” I added. “I am an experienced cook, both in palace and aboard ship.”
“What of your father here?”
Father? I wondered for a brief desperate moment, before I understood the man’s assumption. “Chowdry?” I looked at him. He stank with fear sweat. How had I let this happen? The Goddess had her purpose for Chowdry, of course, but it would be a long time yet before I could glimpse Her plan. “We will account for him.”
“Sir,” said Srini. “I am speaking for Green and her companion. If they stand for the Selistani, I would consider him stood for.”
The captain frowned. “You three are on your parole. Srini, if they jump, you’ll meet their fare out of your own pay.”
“Yes, sir,” the purser said.
“Thank you,” I added.
The Dancing Mistress simply bowed her head.
With that, the hearing was ended. We were now aboard Lucidinous as something midway between prisoner and passenger.
We were shown to quarters. Chowdry bunked with the deck idlers with their hammocks slung near the bow. The Dancing Mistress and I were given a small space below, amid a crowd of grumbling servants within a windowless cabin that stank of sweat and old hair.
Copper Downs was my path home to Kalimpura once more. Perhaps my life was to be traced in a circle. At my quiet request, Srini found me supplies from
the sail maker-even with a kettle, Lucidinous spread canvas when the winds favored her. During the quiet watches I sewed another, cruder version of the blacks I had worn as Neckbreaker.
As the voyage progressed, the Dancing Mistress and I continued to discuss the politics of the city. I could tell that she suspected Federo of something-old trust breached-but it was just as clear that she wanted me to make my own judgments. Chowdry joined us often enough, but he was sullen and withdrawn, obviously lost in regret over his impulse to follow us up the ladder.
All in all, it was a better voyage than I could have asked for.
I did not leave the ship at Lost Port. Neither did the Dancing Mistress. Captain Barks hadn’t forbidden it, but I saw no point in risking his wrath. Instead we remained unusually at leisure, and talked about cities.
“My people do not raise stone halls,” she told me. “We never have. Whatever god first set monkeys free with fire in their hands and ideas in their heads created city builders. It is humans who do this. That is why you outnumber all the other races of the world combined.”
“In all the plate of the world, do you suppose that is true?”
The Dancing Mistress looked at me sidelong. “Perhaps not a hundred thousand leagues east or west, no. But you could not travel that far in your lifetime.”
I smiled at her. “A fast ship and a good crew.” Far away from Choybalsan, the Bittern Court, and all the ghosts already following me, though I was not yet sixteen summers old.
“Until you reached a desert or a mountain spine your hull could not cross. There you would not speak the language, or know the money. You would wind up begging beside some purple dock amid people who speak with feathers and curse one another with flowers.”
I could imagine worse fates. I’d delivered worse fates. Even now, her words that day sometimes call to my heart, though I’ve long since set myself a different course. Then, I merely said, “I am not made to be a sailor on the seas of fate in any case. The Goddess has sent me, you have called me. Someday I will go back to Kalimpura. I know my life.”
“No one knows their life, Green. Not until it is done and some grandchild marks a line or two upon their grave.”
When landfall at Copper Downs was upon us, I begged a favor of the Dancing Mistress. “Do not yet tell Federo I am returned, please.”
“I am not so certain what is the right thing to do here.”
“Nor am I. So let us start with the simple things. You are going to find or send for funds to pay our passage. Chowdry is going ashore with us. You will need all of our fares.”
The Dancing Mistress frowned thoughtfully. “That might make it easier, if I can speak of him. I will need to send word.”
An idea occurred to me, something between fatal idiocy and clear-eyed brilliance. “I will go. As Neckbreaker. My Petraean is as good as any native’s.”
A strange smile crossed the Dancing Mistress’ face. “It will be a test of your ability to pass.”
I nodded and set to dressing. Sometimes I still missed my belled silk, but I’d tried to remake it so many times that the cloth seemed to exist only as effort, not as a reward.
With my face covered, I climbed back to the deck and stood by the rail. We approached Copper Downs in the watery gray light of a lowering rain.
Even with the weather, I could see much of the city as we edged into the harbor. My memory of the bells proved true-buoys, other ships, warnings ringing from rocks, welcomes sounding from the shore.
All that was missing was the clop of Endurance’s bell. The ox was so far away now, dismissed from my dreams along with everything else from those days once I’d gone back and found the misery in which my papa lived. The sound of the harbor reminded me of how much I’d missed them when Federo had first brought me across the sea almost thirteen years ago.
I had few tears left, but the rain made my cheeks slick all the same.
Copper Downs spread before me. Metal roofs gleamed in the rain. Masts bristled along the docks, though not half what I was used to seeing at the Avenue of Ships in Kalimpura. Many moorings were empty as well. Some of the warehouses had burned and not been rebuilt, though judging from the waterfront bustle, that fighting was long since settled.
Two years settled? I wondered.
The Dancing Mistress found me again as Lucidinous slowed to dead in the water just off the docks.
“Srini gave me a chit of our accountings for the voyage.” She passed me a pair of papers folded together, which I slipped within my blacks. “I have written a note requesting the disbursement.”
Making a new port was one of the busiest times for a purser. That Srini had found any moments to spare for her was good. Well, good and the captain’s orders. “Where do I go?”
“The treasury is in the Ducal Palace-the only place with strong rooms not serviced from the payroll of some trading house or great family.” Concern edged into her voice. “Will that sit well with you?”
I felt a rush of memory. “The palace is just a place like any other.” Untrue, but it was also what I must say.
She blurted her next words. “Find the Spindle Street entrance, and ask there for Citrak or Brine. They will know my hand and sign.”
“What surety will they require from me?”
“My note should be sufficient. If they ask, your name is Breaker.”
Bells rang from the poop. The kettle belowdecks shrieked as Lucidinous crept to her tie-up. The rail was lined with sailors and passengers. Copper Downs might as well have been the vessel’s home port. Longshoremen and dock idlers crowded the quay-crowded in the northern sense, at any rate-while vendors and prostitutes and others of the usual dockside sort waited close behind with their colored rags and bright slips of paper.
Once we were secured to the bollards, a plank went down. Srini and two burly hands stood there to watch who and what came off and on. As I understood it, they would first let the crush of people clear, then release those hands that were to take leave in this port. After that, the dockside cranes would bring out the cargoes. Lucidinous might be on her way by tomorrow.
I had a few hours to fetch money back. Shouldering through the crowded deck, I nodded to Srini. He returned the nod; then I set foot once more in the city of my long captivity.
Perhaps I expected the heavens to open, or the Lily Goddess to speak, or ghosts to rise from the stones. In truth, three paces after clearing the plank, I was the same woman I’d been three paces before. The crowd was simple to thread through after my time in Kalimpura, while my air of swaggering menace came back to me easily enough. All my costume needed now was a weapon to back up the implied threat.
I was Green. I was back in Copper Downs. So far, no one had noticed.
Spindle Street was not difficult to locate. I followed it away from the harbor and through a succession of neighborhoods.
Copper Downs was infected with a furtiveness I did not recall from my glimpses of street life in prior years. Our night runs from the Pomegranate Court had been among people laughing, drinking, following their business through the darkness. From Federo’s hidden attic, I’d observed a city of tradesmen and laborers hard at work. There had been no sense of desperation. People did not spend their time checking over their shoulders, or hesitate to round corners.
Here, now, they did. The only ones who walked with confidence were swordsmen, and the few protected by such guards. Ordinary people-baker’s boys, mothers leading their children, clerks, carters, and messengers-seemed fearful.
Of what? I wondered. The riots were several years past. The Dancing Mistress had not mentioned attacks in the street.
My concept of the geography was still sketchy, but I knew the temple district was off to my right, and the Dockmarket behind me, not far east of the Quarry Docks. The old wall rose some distance to my left. Beyond it lay a district of quiet streets and iron gates, where the Factor’s house stood. That was one place that riot could have claimed and I would not have mourned.
I crested a low rise w
here Spindle Street bent slightly west of north. The Ducal Palace rose before me six storeys tall, not so much a castle or a fortress as a manor house grown impossibly large. As I recalled, there had been no wall, just a garden. That had become a flowered overgrowth in the cool climate of the Stone Coast. A wooden gate of obviously recent construction stood open where Spindle Street met Montane Street running alongside the palace grounds.
Here was the Interim Council’s treasury.
As I approached, I found my stride slowing. I had exited the palace at this point the day the Duke fell. Could I locate the window in the Navy Gallery through which I’d slipped? From there, I might even retrace my steps. I wondered who was inside besides Citrak and Brine and whatever toughs protected them.
Instead I marched through the wooden gates and up a muddy path to a doorway that had once served the palace as an ornamental entrance to the garden. There I found a young man in poorly tanned leather armor, chewing on a reed. He seemed unconcerned, in contrast to the fearful state of the rest of the city.
“I am looking for Citrak or Brine,” I announced.
“Mikie’s gone off to his mum’s for grub.” The young man’s eyes were hazel. He was as pale as a fat man’s belly, just like the rest of his countrymen. In a few days, they would come to seem normal to me, but not yet. “Brine’s over at council chambers on a hearing.”
“I have urgent need of funds.”
“Ain’t we all, boy, ain’t we all.”
I leaned close. “The Dancing Mistress has returned across the Storm Sea and must buy her passage off the ship Lucidinous.”
“Who?”
Holding in my next words, I showed him Srini’s chit and the letter from the Dancing Mistress. His lips moved as he traced the words with a grubby finger before giving up after two lines. He looked up at me. “You’ll want Citrak or Brine for this, boy.”
There was no reasonable reply to that. So we waited in shared silence for Citrak to return from his mum’s.
When the man did come back, he was annoyed to find me waiting. He was annoyed at the guard for making me wait. He was annoyed at the counting-men within the building for waiting.